Scusi? Millions of Pupils Miss Out on Language Learning During Lockdown
Pupils – in Britain and across the world – have missed out on all forms of learning over the past year of lockdowns. A new report by the British Council shows that more than half of primary school pupils didn’t receive any form of language learning in the first national lockdown. The Guardian has the story.
The council’s annual survey of English primary and secondary schools found that more than half of primary school pupils and 40% of those at secondaries did not do any language learning during the first national lockdown. And in January and February’s lockdown, 20% of all pupils had no language education.
This will inevitably affect take-up at GCSE and A-level. The report shows that the Government will fail to meet its target of three-quarters of pupils taking a modern language GCSE by 2022, if current trends continue.
The Government wants 75% of pupils to take a modern language GCSE by 2022 and 90% by 2025, as part of its English baccalaureate. The introduction in 2010 of the EBACC, a group of more traditional subjects at GCSE which includes a compulsory language, was meant to help stem the decline in language learning. But according to the report, published on Thursday, only 53% of Year 10 pupils were studying for a language GCSE in 2020. …
Entries for modern languages continue to fall. Analysis of official figures by the Guardian shows that in schools in England, entries for language GCSEs have dropped by 41% since 2003, the last year that taking a modern foreign language in Year 10 was compulsory..
The position of German is particularly precarious, with only 36% of English secondary schools teaching it. Provisional German GCSE entries for 2021 are down 66% on 2003 levels, while for French they are down 59%. Overall, just 5.8% of GCSE entries in England in summer 2020 were for a modern foreign language, according to the Joint Council for Qualifications.
A-level numbers also continue to dwindle: OFQUAL figures show that provisional entries for modern foreign languages this year are down 17% from 2020 figures. …
Although French and German GCSEs have been marked less severely since 2020, after OFQUAL ruled that there should be an adjustment to grading standards, there are still concerns that students are being put off studying modern foreign languages because it is harder to get top grades.
“On average, the grades obtained by students in modern languages are lower by up to one grade than other EBACC subjects,” said [Julie] McCulloch [the Director of Policy at the Association of School and College Leaders].
Worth reading in full.
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Who could ever have expected that would happen? Wow.
Language learning, along with maths (as opposed to arithmetic) has got to be one of the most wasteful expenditures of school time. The vast majority of people who learn languages to GCSE or A Level leave school not remotely able to speak the language and immediately forget all the grammar they were laboriously put through (just as they forget all the mathematical equations and theorems).
Of course children with a talent for languages should be able to study them. But the rest would benefit much more from a general introducton to the culture and languages of Europe – starting with Latin (so helpful in dealing with “scholarly” language). Forget the grammar and focus on vocab plus helpful phrases, and then embed it in the cultural history of Europe (for which we shouldn’t apologise of course).
I tend to agree
With maths, I think basic statistics/probability is way more important than, for example, algebra, for most people. The current madness is in part facilitated by statistical illiteracy.
Clearly the people responsible for lockdown never learned anything about statistics or probability. If they did we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
Who cares? Can’t travel abroad, foreigners can’t come.
Plus, technology can now translate written and spoken language in real time.
Just another step towards the denaturalisation of our species.
time to get back to normal
if people want to lock themselves down or wear masks then they can go ahead
if they want me locked down then its clear they don’t care about my rights and so I don’t care about theirs
Ah, learning languages, travel, learning history etc is so Before Covid. So unnecessary. These days we need only nod at our neighbours through our front windows; even that is not advisable.
Much more of a problem will be the impact of imprisonment at home on the many children whose household is not English-speaking. There are huge unacknowledged needs in this area: governments have been superficially “committed to diversity” and welcoming to incomers, but not willing to make the very expensive adjustments necessary to help children develop a wide vocabulary and fluent, eventually academic, English. Some are from homes where one or both parents cannot read or write, or can only do so in a different script.
These children may be very bright, but they need specific EAL support in some cases, and they need a lot of exposure to fluent spoken English. The provision was already poor, and now they have lost a year.
why did the state let in burdens with a diversity of quality?
Immigration needs to discriminate based on quality. Not volume to make cheaper wages for employers and higher rents for landlords.
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/complacency-could-condemn-thousands-more-to-long-covid
new daily cases have peaked among the unvaccinated. I suspect (if this is true and not a data artefact) that this is because the unvaccinated are young and out and about and that there wasn’t far to go until herd immunity which we are now arriving at.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/fork-in-the-road-senior-ministers-consider-letting-delta-circulate-in-community-20210708-p58844.html
“The NSW government is facing its most difficult decision of the pandemic with senior ministers cautiously canvassing abandoning a zero local transmission strategy and accepting the Delta strain of COVID-19 will circulate in the community.”
“Three senior ministers, who would not speak publicly due to cabinet confidentiality, have acknowledged the state has reached a “fork in the road” where it must choose between a lockdown to eliminate COVID or living with the virus.”
They’ll choose lockdown as that will achieve the impossible
Including the English language
The whole thing has been a debacle, whoever thought this would work needs locking up. The Behavioural Scientists need a psychological evaluation
Can I suggest a bullet in the brain stem?
You cannot do active, or interactive, language learning on Zoom, when only one person can speak at a time.
You CANNOT learn or teach languages while wearing face knickers. I don’t need to explain why to sceptics. It would be hopeless to attempt to explain why to educational and government cretins.
Pardon my French, but quelle f*cking surprise!!
Looks like the lad in the picture ATL linked into the wrong lesson for languages, but his Maths might improve.
He won’t be able to go anywhere to need language skills in the future anyway.
I’m surprised this is about foreign language learning. Traditionally, the UK has been hopeless at promoting foreign language learning, partly because of the assumption that the rest of the world speaks English.
More pertinent would be how English language learning has suffered, along with all other subjects, of course!